Apple iCloud announced for free, replaces MobileMe

Steve Jobs took the stage at WWDC 2011 to talk about Apple’s iCloud service: “Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” Jobs said as he prepared to introduce the major new service. “We’ve got a great solution to this problem. We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” iCloud will store all of your content and automatically push it to all of your devices. It’s integrated with all of your apps, and everything is seamless. MobileMe is out, and iCloud is going to be free — amazing! Hit the jump for more.

Steve Jobs is now demoing the next three apps in iCloud besides Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, and the first one is the App Store, which will re-download all purchases and keep them in sync across all devices. Backup is next, and once daily, your devices will backup important information to the cloud. When you get a new Apple device, just sign in and all of your information will be there, like photos, settings, and so on. Documents in the cloud is next up, and Jobs talked about editing a Pages document and how it will automatically be uploaded to the cloud and available from any of your devices. All iWork apps have this feature, including the new ones Apple released last week for iOS.

Photo stream is Steve’s favorite, he says. “How many times have we taken photos on our iPhone, maybe of our kids, and when we got home to share them on an iPad, we had to go through the process of moving them over.” All photos are uploaded to the cloud automatically, and then synced with all devices including your computer.

The last piece of the iCloud puzzle? You guessed it… music! “It’s the same old story,” Jobs explained. “I buy something on my iPhone and it’s not on my other devices. I grab my iPod and I go to listen to that song and it ain’t there!” You can now download any purchased song to any of your devices for free, just like you can with apps, and you can flip a switch to allow all your devices to automatically download newly purchased music.

Apple is giving all users 5GB of free storage, for documents, back ups, mail, etc — and support for up to 20,000 songs! There’s a developer beta available today and iTunes in the cloud will run on iOS 4.3. Here’s Apple’s full release:

Apple Introduces iCloud

Free Cloud Services Beyond Anything Offered to Date

SAN FRANCISCO—June 6, 2011—Apple® today introduced iCloud®, a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch®, Mac® or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

The free iCloud services include:

The former MobileMe® services—Contacts, Calendar and Mail—all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers.

The App Store™ and iBookstore℠ now download purchased iOS apps and books to all your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.

iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all your devices. When you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all your devices. Apple’s Pages®, Numbers® and Keynote® apps already take advantage of iCloud Storage. Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backup—which is more amazing since the storage for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesn’t count towards this 5GB total. Users will be able to buy even more storage, with details announced when iCloud ships this fall.

iCloud’s innovative Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos you take or import on any of your devices and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices and computers. So you can use your iPhone to take a dozen photos of your friends during the afternoon baseball game, and they will be ready to share with the entire group on your iPad (or even Apple TV®) when you return home. Photo Stream is built into the photo apps on all iOS devices, iPhoto® on Macs, and saved to the Pictures folder on a PC. To save space, the last 1,000 photos are stored on each device so they can be viewed or moved to an album to save forever. Macs and PCs will store all photos from the Photo Stream, since they have more storage. iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, which is plenty of time to connect your devices to iCloud and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi.

iTunes® in the Cloud lets you download your previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no additional cost, and new music purchases can be downloaded automatically to all your devices. In addition, music not purchased from iTunes can gain the same benefits by using iTunes Match, a service that replaces your music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if we can match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store®, it makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of weeks to upload your entire music library), and uploads only the small percentage of unmatched music. iTunes Match will be available this fall for a $24.99 annual fee. Apple today is releasing a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud, without iTunes Match, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3. iTunes in the Cloud will support all iPhones that iOS 5 supports this fall.

Apple is ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers, including the third recently completed in Maiden, NC. Apple has invested over $500 million in its Maiden data center to support the expected customer demand for the free iCloud services.

Pricing & Availability
The iCloud beta and Cloud Storage APIs are available immediately to iOS and Mac Developer Program members atdeveloper.apple.com. iCloud will be available this fall concurrent with iOS 5. Users can sign up for iCloud for free on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5 or a Mac running Mac OS® X Lion with a valid Apple ID. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit. iTunes Match will be available for $24.99 per year (US only).

iTunes in the Cloud is available today in the US and requires iTunes 10.3 and iOS 4.3.3. Automatic download of apps and books is available today. Using iCloud with a PC requires Windows Vista or Windows 7; Outlook 2010 or 2007 is recommended for accessing contacts and calendars.

Yeah but it’s not as seamless and magical as the iCloud. Watch the even and you will agree.

Bullyboyb

I hope you are being sarcastic otherwise you my dear friend clearly have no idea what you are talking about, I will spell it out for you.
On wp7 all these features exist and automatically sync to you 25GB free skydrive allocation. Log onto any device computer or otherwise and your documents pictures e.t.c are there. You can make these folders private so your selected messanger, live, facebook friends can access them. You can do more on skydrive. Read my post below.

Only downside for apple fans is you can’t upload porn it gets deleted off skydrive.

I am beggining to thing my HTC trophy running wp7 is magical.

Everything apple announced is already on wp7 or is coming with the mango update.
Camera from lock screen, facebook and twitter deep intergartion, windows chat and facebook chat from the text message screen, flagging email, tabbed browsing e.t.c the only problem is BGR won’t report on stuff like that unless its apple ios.

Anonymous

@Bullboy:disqus These features may already be on WP7, but WP7 is still lacking in OTHER areas.

Don’t pretend WP7 is yet on the same level as iOS or Android.

http://www.absolutefiction.com Jed Tylman

“magical”
Wipe that one off your vocabulary.
It’s a ridiculous and childish word that will backfire pretty soon.

Windowsthumbsdown

Windows is still behind. It shows promise but we will have to see. I have a windows 2 android and an iPhone 4.. The perks of selling phones. Windows sits in it’s box now until the update. My atrix and iPhone are much better.

Bullyboyb

Depends what you are talking about. Overall experience yes I agree with you. But when it comes to skydrive, facebook and twitter intergration, notifications, I beg to differ.

By the way I thought the find my iphone thing was an app correct me if I am wrong. Is it intergrated into the os straight out of the box? Used the 3GS for 1 week and sold it.now have the iphone 4 I got on contract just to resale. Must admit they do sell for a good price these idevices. :D

http://infotainmentempire.blogspot.com Rob

Isn’t the Skydrive limited to 50MB file sizes or something like that though?

Bullyboyb

True but you should realise microsoft is trying to avoid copyrighted material like music and videos being uploaded. This is because record labels and film studios will be quick to sue for copyright infringement especially were M$ is involved. I have my zune pass for music where I can listen to almost any album I want as long as it is available. My documents and pictures are by no means 50 mb each.

sirpaul

Yep. I use dropbox.

Anonymous

Just use your phones people…regardless of brand. Use it to improve your personal workflow. Use it to impress your boss at work (who probably doesn’t know how to use Word 97 but carries a Blackberry. Lol.) so you can get a promotion. Use it for entertainment to impress that girl you’ve got your eye on. Use it to streamline your home life so you have more time to spend with your kids. Use it to give your brand critical consumer feedback so that they can improve on their next device/os release. Etc…

What’s the point of worrying how the media reports on one brand over another when you already have the luxury of picking and choosing what subsidized phone you want own in a world where some people still don’t know the difference between a RAZR flip and where their next meal is coming from…

Did I mention you get 25 GB free don’t have to pay a penny comes as standard. Log into you skydrive account anytime and call your phone if you have lost it. Log onto your skydrive account and lock your phone remotely and even put a message on the lock screen to alert who ever finds it to call the number you want or put any message you like. I guess these last 2 “monster” feature will be on ios 6.

keymaker

Find my iphone has done that for years already son, and it’s completely free. It even tells you where the phone is at and will make the phone ring even if it’s set to silent mode. All free.

Bullyboyb

Educate me Mr keymaker. Do you have to download an app or is it intergrated into the os straight out of the box?

Jrsnfd

Billyboyb, it comes straight out to the box.

Jrsnfd

Actually they are on and have been on the iPhone since the iphone 2. They only became free 2 years ago. Oh you have always been able to log in and check its GPS position. Maybe you should learn more about what you want to critique

JD

MobileMe was never free. Find My iPhone became free with iOS 4.2 not 2 years ago.

keymaker

No son you don’t have to download any app to use the find my phone feature, just hop onto any PC and it’s done. You can start tracking the device.

http://justinfreid.com Justin Freid

Just to clarify, the feature of being found is built in: you don’t have to download anything to register with the service.
If you want to find a registered phone you can, but don’t have to, download the Find My iPhone from the App Store.
As stated earlier, this only became free recently.

keymaker

You forgot to mention that it will be a completely free service with no ads, this event truly is magical…………..

http://twitter.com/jimd99 Jim D

I would like to know if I will be getting a partial refund for the Mobile Me service I paid $99 for in January. I believe I’m owed $50 now.

You are disgusting to even conjure up a thought of someone sucking anything off another male. You need some serious mental help.

Anonymous

What is it with Apple Haters and sucking other men?!! F’ing gross

Jayhammy

What you posted is either a joke or utter crap. Google is all about the Cloud and the internet. Apple isn’t, and certainly won’t be after this disappointing launch of iCloud. I can store up to 60,000 songs, no maximum file size, in Google’s Cloud and play them on any Android device or computer through my Google account.

Scott

And it will take you a year to get all that music uploaded. lol

Anonymous

Just got Google Music to test. I uploaded 40 gigs of music to Google Music in just under 9 hours. And that’s with a crappy DSL connection. Though, I have ~8K songs.

60K songs will take roughly 3 days on my crap connection.. and that is just one time – since I’m sure not many people plan to refresh another 60K each time, rather, just a few albums/singles here and there. It’s standard marketing to point out per-snikety stuff like the upload time.

iCloud for music really sucks since it is limited to *only music purchased on iTunes* :-O~~~~

Though, I have also been using Subsonic to stream from my home server to smartphone/laptop vs. bothering with cloud services. I never have to upload and it gives me unlimited control and storage.

http://www.droiddoes.com/ Norm

It’s official. This fall I will be selling all 36 of my DROID devices and getting one iphone.

Purchased music in the cloud?? Looks like everyone’s trove of torrents and rips are gonna be left out of the party

IPwn

No they won’t. If you actually read the live blog you would notice that iTunes will offer a service that is $24.99 a year. That service will match your music library to the iTunes library and automatically give you a DRM-free purchase of the song converted to AAC 256 kbps to be stored in the cloud.

Anonymous

I wonder if you need to pay for this yearly? Say I don’t this fall. This songs I ripped are no synced on all my devices. Now I will have to pay again next year to get this resynced to all devices? Or just new songs/whatever?

That’s my big question. Because once the service is synced, I should be able to have my own 256k copy of my own, correct? Now that should sync over for free next year?

http://www.profitperspectives.com/ Steven Appenzeller

I think you know the answer to that… you will pay tribute to Apple in perpetuity to have access to your own music. That’s a great deal, right?

iPwn

Once you match the song. It is loaded into the cloud as a purchased song but is DRM free. You just pay to sync ripped songs. You don’t have to pay to access the songs loaded to the cloud

Anonymous

You didn’t see the Match service?

Jayhammy

And any music purchased on Amazon. I buy all my music from Amazon, never iTunes: better deals and better bitrate.

Ddudes34

Verizon 4.3 ?

Anonymous

a cloud music service that doesn’t stream music. lol.

http://twitter.com/thealienpunk blawdy

Geezzz truly amazing and revolutionary !!! oh, wait.. I’ve been using this since i got mu now pretty old Droid !

Max

In other news, RIM announces a new Curve.

http://infotainmentempire.blogspot.com Rob

So like Amazon’s Cloud service just not as nice with the storage (15GB more if you buy an album… don’t know if they’re still doing that promotion though).

Anonymous

I want to know why cloud services are SO important if we’re going to have data caps/overage charges in the near future (if you don’t have them already).

iPwn

Most of the cloud sync is done over wifi and not your cellula data plan. Read next time.

Anonymous

Yeah, so when you’re sitting on the train on your ride home from work and streaming music the whole time, you won’t be using any data. Try not being an ass next time.

IPwn

Seriously?! You REALLY need to learn to read. iCloud isn’t a streaming service. Maybe you don’t get the concept?

IPwn

To be kind and help you out here, “automatically download newly purchased music”. Straight from the WWDC presentation today.

Anonymous

Okay, go ahead. Download 50 GB of music onto your 32 GB iPhone so you don’t have to stream it.

Maybe you should read. I said CLOUD SERVICES…not iCloud.

Lmao @ IPwn pwning himself over and over!!

iPwn

Your arguments make no sense, you are completely lost. Why post a question that has nothing to do with iCloud or this article?

Cloud services are an easy method to sync data between multiple devices. Apple addresses the data issue (like I mentioned). What other answers are you searching for?

ROFLMAO @ jpatlee for being a complete moron. You win idiot of the day award, congrats.

Anonymous

You are wrong. iCloud does not do streaming.

Anonymous

I still want to know why these CLOUD SERVICES are so important with data caps and overage charges around.

If iCloud doesn’t do streaming, then fine. But iCloud isn’t the only CLOUD SERVICE. So no…I am not wrong. I am not a moron. It sounds to me like you two are the morons for not being able to understand the term CLOUD SERVICE.

Lol, careful now. Make sure you delete that lovely secretay’s number off skydrive, sorry google cloud, no, I meant icloud. Is that what its called?
Just praying apple don’t trademark the word cloud better still the word sync.

Anonymous

So, they just announced Kin Studio?

bradb

As someone said before, what about for those of us who have current MobileMe subscriptions??

Anonymous

The music/video cloud is a great concept (proven already with Amazon and Dropbox). Though, just about everyone with a hefty .mp3 collection – even heavy iTunes/Apple users – will NOT want to use this iCloud service since it is limited only to songs purchased in iTunes. Personally I have numerous albums I have ripped from CD to .mp3. If you think otherwise you are kidding yourself.

Drichard

So what happens to iWeb?

http://twitter.com/jimmyfal Jimmy Fallon

So since imitation is the highest form of flattery, apparently Apple is copying the fact that Windows had been copying them by copying them back. Apple fanboys are always so offended when this happens to them, but me, I’m just flattered.